Playing catch up with Facebook’s Like button, Google has launched +1, a platform that allows users to say that they like certain ads and search results. Obviously, this isn’t something new, at least in Malaysia. Last year, 1Malaysia was launched a year ahead of schedule and it has now expanded to include 1Radio, 1Tv, 1Clinic, 1Email, etc (let us to come clean, everything except – 1.my).

And just when we thought that the “1” fever was losing steam, “Cloud” becomes one of the most hyped terms today. Of course, the Cloud we’re talking about here isn’t the “visible mass of water droplets or frozen ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body.” We’re talking Cloud computing.

You could say that Cloud reached a climax when iCloud was finally revealed at Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference 2011. Then, all of a sudden, books, music, files and photos are all on Cloud. Fortunately, Malaysia isn’t far behind when it comes to technology. After all, we have the tallest building in the Clouds and we can even have roti canai above the Clouds.

So, what is Cloud?

Steve Jobs says don’t even need to know what Cloud is, because you never interact with it – your apps do.

End users shouldn’t worry, however, because the moment you upload a picture on Facebook, navigate KL using Google Maps or play Angry Bird on Google Chrome, you are in fact, in a transition to Cloud. To you, it is a matter of experience which makes sharing faster. It also makes life easier and fun! So don’t crack your head trying to understand Cloud, it exists in the background. Think of it this way, you don’t need to know how a car works in order to drive a car, and remember Web 2.0? Who gives a hoot about it now?

It’s wise for businesses to make the change, however. You can be a mover and shaker by helping your customers make the transition to Cloud. Ask yourself these questions – Is your website hosted on Cloud? Does your product require an additional hardware to run? Think again and check out Cloud Computing, as well as this article.

Pin

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Pin is the founder of 1.com.my. He hosts email and websites for his customers on Cloud. He has written two books on Online Business and Linux, and he also founded a Web Developer Group that has over 100 friends. To learn more, please visit his website, or join his Facebook page.

Meet Nurul, a freelance graphic designer who’s experienced and very creative. She has helped us with several projects and always delivers very nice artwork.If you need to outsource your graphic design needs, you can get in touch with her at freelancerheaven@gmail.com or visit http://www.zadyadigital.com

Happily, Nurul has also become our client by choosing our Cloud Sites product to host the websites of a few ventures she has set up.

We at 1.com.my, are happy to provide a range of services, in order to meet your every email hosting, web hosting and domain name need. Since they are all renewable services, we’re happy to report that many of our customers have chosen to stay with us year after year, some for up to 10 years!

To all our loyal customers, we wish you the heartiest of thanks, and we invite all of you to tell us why you’ve decided to stay with us all these years.

Shin, an SEO expert, decided to engage us to manage his company’s domain name and web hosting. His main concern was that the new web hosting should be easy to use, reliable and affordable, as they are a web hosting reseller. At the same time, his company was in need of a reliable email system, and he also has a number of domain names registered with several registrars and they’re not managed under one roof.

Our team explained the risks of continuing with such a setup and convinced him that we are technically competent to take over all these services and provide a one-stop solution that’s more cost efective. Fortunately for us, Shin is a dream to work with. He is always willing to listen and ask questions.

During the migration of his many domain names, Shin shared with us how his previous web hosting providers had managed to disapppoint him. The technical support he requested for, for example, was often not professionally handled. To save him trouble and frustration, we suggested that we dealt with his existing hosting provider directly, so that he doesn’t have to be the person caught in between.

We like representing our customers and helping to solve their problems. This is someting we do regularly, actually. By doing so, customers are less stressed during the migration, and to us, customer satrisfaction is priceless!

Parallels Plesk Panel - Complicated, even for a tech people

During the migration, we also discovered that Shin’s previous web hosting company had been using Parallels Plesk Panel. Not only is the name a tongue twister, but when we took a closer look, we were incredibly surprised because the system’s far too complicated, even for tech people like us! It’s not an intuitive system and it’s loaded with features that are hardly used. It’s not that different from a Cpanel actually. In comparison, take a look at our hosting control panel, which is much, much easier to use and understand! Less is more!

1.com.my’s Cloud is an advanced, enterprise-level platform but it is also very simple! It is an easy way to run your applications. Code it and load it. We take care of the rest – monitoring, patching, configuration, security, scaling…etc letting you focus on what you’re good at – developing! All the headache of server administration is our responsibility.

Easy two step process

Load it up: Your cloud site can be created in a matter of minutes – load balancing, clustering and redundant storage are all inherited by your application automatically.

Watch it scale: From the first byte, your site is hosted on advanced clustered technology, designed for high traffic, high performance websites. When your site grows bigger than your initial solution, you pay inexpensive scale pricing for exactly what you use – nothing more.

Cloud Computing is Internet based development and use of computer technology (The Cloud being the metaphor for the Internet). It is a form of computing where resources are provided as a service over the internet to users who need not have knowledge, expertise or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.

It enables the on demand allocation or de-allocation of CPU, Storage and network bandwidth and has the ability to meet the scalability requirements to suit user demands quickly without users having to engineer for peak loads.

Cloud computing is the convergence of three major trends:

1) Virtualisation – where applications are separated from infrastructure

2) Utility computing – where server capacity is accessed across a grid as a variably priced shared service

3) Software as a service – Where applications are available on demand on a subscription basis.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting (often also referred to as clustered hosting) is a step up from the shared hosting infrastructure that is commonly used today. By handling security, load balancing and server resources virtually you are no longer restricted to the limits of one physical piece of hardware. In basic terms, online operations are not limited to a single server, they have access to the processing power of a number of servers that are distributed in real time.

In a physical environment e.g. a web site is limited to the resource constraints that is housed within the physical unit/server (RAM, processing power, bandwidth etc). The concept of a cloud infrastructure no longer has this limitation – you can purchase as much computing power as you need from a virtually inexhaustible resource. The nature of the infrastructure means that scaling up and down is seemless and thus spikes in traffic aren’t problematic.

Load-balancing occurs at the software level and is dynamically load-balanced across a number of servers. Servers can be added or removed from the cluster with no impact or downtime on hosted applications meaning less disruption for customers. The cloud architecture has the ability to provide small and medium enterprises the stability and resilience of a web hosting architecture that a few years ago only huge corporate organizations could obtain through huge IT expenditure.

What technologies does the Cloud use?

It is quite a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 among other recent technology trends, where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of users.

What infrastructure is the Cloud based on?

The majority of cloud computing infrastructure is built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies delivering reliable services through data centres. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers.

How long have Cloud Technologies been around?

The underlying concept dates back to 1960 when John McCarthy opined that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility”; indeed it shares characteristics with service bureaus which date back to the 1960s. The term cloud had already come into commercial use in the early 1990s to refer to large ATM networks.By the turn of the 21st century, the term “cloud computing” had started to appear, although most of the focus at this time was on Software as a service.

What are compute cycles?

Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

How many compute cycles will my applications use?

Since web applications vary so greatly, it is hard to make a perfect guess. However, there are some guidelines that can help. First, you can think of 10,000 compute cycles as being about the same processing power as you’d get from a decent dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance. For example 10,000 compute cycles would power:

* about 11 million page views of mosso.com
* about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image
* about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system

How far can I really scale?

In truth, there are no limits with Cloud Infrastructure. You can push hundreds of millions of requests on single domains. However your site will need to be compatible with the Cloud. Please refer to our technology section to ensure you can run your applications successfully on the Cloud.

A 1.my friend named Adline recently asked, â€œPin, how much would it cost to get my blog hosted somewhere other than blogger and to get my own domain name?â€

Well, Adline, basically you have two options:

1) Get your own domain name and hosting – It costs you less than RM200 a year. The hosting is installed with WordPress. You can design your own theme, whereas Blogspot is a hosted solution, so you canâ€™t change the layout much. WordPress also has many plugins, widgets and it is powerful. It is more user friendly as it is faster to post and has a smarter comment system. 1.com.my has been using WordPress since 2006, and weâ€™re happy with it.

2) Keep the Blog with Blogspot – Just mask your existing Blogspot URL with your own domain name. Masking the domain name gives you an advantage in terms of the branding of your website. Visitors remember your site more easily. For example instead of using yourdomain.blogspot.com, you can now use yourdomain.com!

Let’s get started with a simple question â€“ What is Malware? ‘Malware’ is a ‘malicious software’ that’s been designed to infiltrate a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. Once the owner’s computer system has been infected, it might spread and harm other machines either within the same network or others.

Malware warning sign by Google

One of the most common tell-tale signs that a website is under attack is the message below, or, it might just return you to a blank white page. Fortunately, there are a few things that you can do to get things to run smoothly again:

1. Returning to a blank page
2. The alignment of the content on your page is off
3. Certain dynamic-pages of your website don’t work
4. Some of your plug-ins used in WordPress don’t work
5. Files shown on FTP client ends with the extension â€œ.INFECTEDâ€
6. A malware warning sign appears on the web browser
7. Unknown .htaccess files in directories

Ning is the leading online platform for the worldâ€™s organizers, activists and influencers to create their own social network

One of our customers had created a social project on Ning.com, which allows its members to interact with one another and share pictures and songs. Things were going well, until she discovered that their yearly subscription fee for a premium package containing the features that she currently uses, now costs USD400 a year! Describing this as ‘horrible,’ she came to us seeking for a more feasible alternative.

We reviewed her current website and looked up similar cases. Some have suggested that users migrate from Ning.com to WordPress MU. But, we’ve tried WordPress MU in the past, and found the multi blog to be far too complicated.

Then, we explored the possibility of migrating from Ning.com to WordPress, but we found that WordPress may not be such a good idea either since the two platforms are so different.

Finally, we discovered that a Facebook Page would be the best alternative. We did the checks, informed our customer of our findings and the customer checked back with us to find out if an FB Page could support Video and MP3 sharing. We told her that all this can be done with Youtube’s embedded code and a Facebook application called MP3

Her response? “Thanks again for all your help! I really am very happy with the service I’ve received from 1.com.my”

The installation of Joomla and Opencart usually takes hours to complete. You’ll be required to upload thousands of files to the server before you can even start the installation. To save time, you can upload a single tar file and untar it using the build in Cron management on the Web Hosting Control Panel.

Here’s how to use cron to untar files

1) Save the following lines as a new file and upload to the cgi-bin folder. Update the path accordingly. Change the file permission to 755.

Our new web hosting client, Multazam, wasn’t very happy because the domain name he wished to register was not available. It was actually registered by someone else earlier and was not renewed. The domain name expired but was not released by Registrar. This meant he couldn’t register it even though it has expired.

We tried to suggest several alternate domain named, but they were simply not what he wanted. Finally, one day, the domain name was released, so we quickly snapped it up and registered it. We then set up a Blog with this domain name.

The Blog, Our Different View (ODV) is another way for MACC to educate and enlighten the public about the truth regarding MACC from our own perspective.

Last night, our team managed to complete yet another web hosting setup within 2 hours. All this done at breakneck speed although it is after office hours and the next day is Labour Day.

Since the new domain name is .com, it can be registered and approved immediately and activated within a couple of hours. Then, we proceeded with the web hosting setup. The customer had chosen us because of the Ruby on Rail support on our Cloud platform.

This morning, we found this short but sweet message from the customer: “Cepatnya. Thank you very much Pin and the gang.” You’re most welcome!

“Despite these initiatives, customers using Internet services nationwide may experience some degree of service degradation, such as slow browsing while accessing international websites” said Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM).

A repair of fault of submarine cable linking Malaysia and International network is expecting to cause Internet downtime to Malaysia Internet users, until 2nd May.

Our technical team are ready with alternatives to help our email and web hosting customers. Talk to us if you need our help.

Cable laid beneath the sea to carry telecommunications between countries.